From the small balcony of this flat overlooking Plaça Sant Just I watched the guiris pass by, marked by the May sun and other (enlightened) tourists visiting the Palau Moxó, students in shorts, an Argentinian waitress from the Bliss, the municipal cleaning services vehicle (lime green on white) and its operator with talcum powder tattoos (blue-green on brown skin).... The pigeons swirl in almost erratic spirals over the stream of water that sprinkles the square, the light bounces off the shiny pavement and sends up a smell of wet dust, of summer camps in the city, of a medieval market.
I stretched out my hand until I almost touched the stone: the fourteenth-century buttresses of the church of Sant Just i Pastor.
